This is a good idea…

Social Security to drop obsolete jobs used to deny disability benefits

For decades, Social Security has used obsolete jobs like pneumatic tube operator and nut sorter to deny disabled claimants.

…and long overdue but let us pause for a moment to regret the loss of pneumatic tubes to our increasingly automated world. They were magnificent devices.

I remember them from big department stores where one's payment (in cash!) would be placed in a carrier capsule and thence in a tube behind the counter to disappear with a lot pop and then, after a short wait, whoosh back containing the correct change. 

But that's not all they did. Paris had a system of pneumatic tubes that distributed mail citywide until it was finally shut down in 1984. And as this story in Smithsonian describes, New York had a pneumatic mail system until 1953,

“The carriers were not only a complete success for the transportation of first-class matter, such as letters, but equally satisfactory for the carriage of packages of every description, including a full suit of clothes, a package of books, a live cat in a cotton sack and [a] dozen … eggs, etc.,” wrote Second Assistant Postmaster General W.S. Shallenberger in a report.

Pneumatic tubes also delivered mail in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis.